Bible Commentaries
Revelation 21

Verse 1

No More Sea

And the sea is no more.— Revelation 21:1.

1. We love the sea. A preacher who spent his holiday in Braemar, writes enthusiastically of its frowning mountains, the silver streak of its beautiful river, the inspiration of its bracing air. But it lacked one thing. There was no glimpse to be had of the sea.

There is a most charming passage in the Life of Gladstone where Mr. Morley is recalling the talks at Biarritz during the very last years, in which he tells of the old man’s passionate delight in the buoyant breakers thundering home on the reefs. He felt as if he could hardly bear to live without the sound of the sea in his ears. He had, indeed, that within him which beat in response to that tumult of waters, to that titanic pulse of the Atlantic. But he had in him a note of something deeper still. Not in tumultuous buoyancy, not in passionate upheaval, lay the secret of his primal powers. Rather you felt in him, behind and beyond this energy of elemental vitality, the spirit of the serious athlete, in possession of his soul, disciplined in austerity, secure of a peace that passeth understanding, held fast, in hidden calm, by the vision of a quiet land in which there is no more sea. 1 [Note: H. S. Holland, Personal Studies, 45.]

I lie in my niche under the stunted hawthorn watching the to and fro of the sea, and Æolus shepherding his white sheep across the blue. I love the sea with its impenetrable fathoms, its wash and undertow, and rasp of shingle sucked anew. I love it for its secret dead in the Caverns of Peace, of which account must be given when the books are opened and earth and heaven have fled away. Yet in my love there is a paradox, for as I watch the restless, ineffective waves I think of the measureless, reflective depths of the still and silent Sea of Glass, of the dead, small and great, rich or poor, with the works which follow them, and of the Voice as the voice of many waters, when the multitude of one mind rends heaven with alleluia: and I lie so still that I almost feel the kiss of White Peace on my mouth. 2 [Note: Michael Fairless, The Roadmender (ed. 1911), 9.]

A little girl friend of mine, whose home was by one of the great sea-lochs of the West Highlands, was being taught about heaven by her mother, and was told that there would be no sea. “Then,” she said, “I shall not like it.” All the child’s pleasures nearly were associated with the sea—bathing, fishing, boating. On that changeful coast what is one hour mist and dulness and gloom, grey rock and wan water, is the next a fairyland of lights and colours most strange and beautiful, on which to look is enough delight. All island and peninsular nations are lovers of the sea. When Xenophon’s Greeks, retreating after the battle of Cunaxa, came, after long desert marches and conflicts, in sight of the Black Sea, they burst out into joyous cries—“Thalassa! Thalassa!” A modern poet has expressed the strange fascination that the sea has for the men of these isles, in spite of all its fickleness and changes, thus:

“Ye that bore us, O restore us!

She is kinder than ye;

For the call is on our heart-strings,”

Said the men of the sea.

“Ye that love us, can ye move us?

She is dearer than ye;

And your sleep will be the sweeter,”

Said the men of the sea.

“Oh, our fathers in the churchyard,

She is older than ye;

And our graves will be the greener,”

Said the men of the sea.

The sea is our life’s symbol, the port for which we sail, that heaven on which our hearts are set, and “we are as near heaven by sea as by land.” Because we are a maritime people we symbolize the ultimate, to which we go, as a royal port. It is a simple affair to us to consider all our aids for the journey in terms of the voyage. Thus does Religion use the sea for its purpose, and it seems natural that it should do so when we remember that, in the region of fact as well as in that of imagination, Religion has used the sea. And it seems a natural use, for when a man’s mind is exercised by the highest emotions at the same time that he is about to contend with the dangers of a natural element, it is easy to believe that, from that moment, the association between emotion and element becomes for ever established in his mind, and in the mind of his kind, and that so deep is the impression made by the element that it becomes his symbol nearest at hand for the struggles in relation to which the emotions are aroused. In such manner may old thinkers have written, their mind in both worlds. And when we use a symbol such as this we do not draw a firm line between emotion and element. An earthly voyage may also signify a heavenly. 1 [Note: Frank Elias, Heaven and the Sea, 6.]

2. But the sea did not appeal to the Israelites. They never were sailors. In the only period of their history in which they did much voyaging their ships were manned by Phœnicians—“shipmen that had knowledge of the sea.” And St. John had special reasons for disliking it. We know that he took no merely material interest in the future, and that when he says “the sea was no more,” he was drawing no map of the geography of the new heaven and the new earth. But he had his reasons for choosing the symbol of the sea, for using it as a figure of the things which were to be absent from the world of the redeemed. We shall find his reasons if we consider what the sea stood for to the Apostle.

(1) Mystery.—It is largely a mystery still. It is largely unfathomed and unknown. It is our great undiscovered continent.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.

It is itself a mystery. Says Jefferies: “There is an infinite possibility about the sea; it may do what it is not recorded to have done. It is not to be ordered. It may overleap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has potency unfathomable. There is still something in it not quite grasped and understood—something still to be discovered—a mystery.”

This aspect of the sea impressed itself upon the Israelites. “Thy way,” says the Psalmist, “was in the sea, and thy paths in the great waters, and thy footsteps were not known.” And so Cowper:

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm.

The mystery of the sea is a figure of the mystery of life. It is an aspect of life that appeals to every one. “This world,” said Charles Dickens, “is a world of sacred and solemn mystery; let no man despise it or take it lightly.” Christina Rossetti sings:

The mystery of Life, the mystery

Of Death I see

Darkly, as in a glass;

Their shadows pass,

And talk with me.

The prophets have felt the mystery of life more than all others; and St. John was a prophet. Often had he prayed with Job, “Oh that I knew where I might find him!” Then Jesus came and called him. The mystery of the past, of the present, of the future—all the mystery of life was dispelled. He knew that in the redeemed world there would be no baffling questions remaining. “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

The sea is the emblem of mystery, and each wave unfolding itself from its bosom seems about to tell the secret. But it falls back, and man cannot catch its whispers; “the sea saith, It is not in me.” But the time is coming when the ocean of mystery shall open its breast and “the sea give up its dead.” 1 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 119.]

Heaven overarches earth and sea,

Earth-sadness and sea-bitterness.

Heaven overarches you and me:

A little while and we shall be—

Please God—where there is no more sea

Nor barren wilderness.

Heaven overarches you and me,

And all earth’s gardens and her graves.

Look up with me, until we see

The day break and the shadows flee.

What though to-night wrecks you and me

If so to-morrow saves? 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 286.]

(2) Treachery.—The Israelites were struck with the restlessness of the sea. But its restlessness suggested purpose. It was uncertain. It could not be counted upon. There was something akin to treachery in its moods. “It is the scene,” says Dr. Macmillan, 1 [Note: Bible Teachings in Nature, 303.] “alternately of the softest dalliance, and the fiercest rage of the elements. Now it lies calm and motionless as an inland lake—without a ripple on its bosom—blue as the sapphire sky above—golden with the reflexion of sunset clouds—silvery with the pale mystic light of moon and stars; and now it tosses its wild billows mountains high, and riots in the fury of the storm. One day it steals softly up the shore, kissing the shells and pebbles with a gentle sigh as though they were gifts of love; the next it dashes its white-crested waves, laden with wrecks and corpses, against the iron rocks. Treacherous and deceitful it lures the mariner on by its beauty, until completely in its power; and then it rises up suddenly in fury, and with an overflowing flood carries him away.”

“You can domesticate mountains,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes, 2 [Note: Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.] “but the sea is ferœ naturœ. It is feline. It licks your feet—its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you, but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened.”

St. John had had experience of the treachery of the sea in the early days of his manhood on the Sea of Galilee. And now as he looked back upon his life, what had the outward circumstances of it been but a sea of uncertainty, and even of treachery? But the redeemed have sought and found a kingdom that cannot be moved. They have come to a city that hath foundations. In the New Earth the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.

“You’re quite a sailor, I suppose?” I said to Em’ly.

“No,” replied Em’ly, shaking her head, “I’m afraid of the sea.”

“ Afraid!” I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking very big at the mighty ocean. “I an’t!”

“ Ah! but it’s cruel,” said Em’ly; “I have seen it very cruel to some of our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our house all to pieces.”

“ I hope it wasn’t the boat that—”

“ That father was drownded in?” said Em’ly. “No. Not that one; I never see that boat.”

“ Nor him?” I asked her.

Little Em’ly shook her head. “Not to remember!” 1 [Note: Dickens, David Copperfield, chap. iii.]

I remember once talking with a fisherwoman who had lost her husband and two sons at sea, away down in Cullercoats Bay on the Northumberland coast. I asked her what she liked most to think about when she thought about the land beyond, and I was not surprised to hear her say, “And there shall be no more sea.” 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 221.]

I have desired to go

Where Springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,

And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

And out of the swing of the sea. 3 [Note: Gerard Hopkins.]

(3) Separation.—This, we may be sure, was the chief thought in the mind of St. John as he stood on some rock in the little lonely isle of Patmos and looked out across the sea. His eye was toward Jerusalem. For he was an Israelite with an Israelite’s love of Mount Zion, the place where God delights to dwell. The sea was the symbol of separation and exile. In Christ he had learned the meaning of the word philadelphia, “brotherly love.” He loved the brethren, fulfilling the New Commandment: “that ye love one another, even as I have loved you.” And the sea now separated him from them. In the New World there will be no sea of separation. All will be one, and all will be together. Different as are our thoughts of the sea from St. John’s thoughts, we are one with him regarding the pain of separation, let the separation be caused by sea or land, by life or death.

On that day, on that lovely 6th of April, such as I have described it,—that 6th of April, about nine o’clock in the morning,—we were seated at breakfast near the open window—we, that is, Agnes, myself, and little Francis. The freshness of morning spirits rested upon us; the golden light of the morning sun illuminated the room; incense was floating through the air from the gorgeous flowers within and without the house. There in youthful happiness we sat gathered together, a family of love; and there we never sat again. Never again were we three gathered together, nor ever shall be, so long as the sun and its golden light, the morning and the evening, the earth and its flowers, endure. 1 [Note: De Quincey, The Household Wreck.]

On 18th May 1826, a couple of days after the death of his wife at Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott writes in his diary: “Another day, and a bright one to the external world, again opens on us; the air soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves glittering. They cannot refresh her to whom mild weather was a natural enjoyment. Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No, no. She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere—somehow; where we cannot tell; how we cannot tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me. The necessity of this separation,—that necessity which rendered it even a relief,—that and patience must be my comfort.” 2 [Note: The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (ed. 1891), 194.]

In a letter to Mrs. Lydia M. Child, thanking her for her book Looking Towards Sunset—a book which he regrets that his sister, then lately dead, never saw, Whittier writes: “How strange and terrible are these separations—this utter silence—this deep agony of mystery—this reaching out for the love which we feel must be ever living, but which gives us no sign! Ah, my friend! What is there for us but to hold faster and firmer our faith in the goodness of God? that all which He allots to us or our friends is for the best!—best for them, for us, for all. Let theology, and hate, and bigotry, talk as they will, I for one will hold fast to this, God is good; He is our Father! He knows what love is, what our hearts, sore and bereaved, long for, and He will not leave us comfortless, for is He not Love?” 3 [Note: Life and Letters of John Greenleaj Whittier, ii. 485.]

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,

And they are swept by balms of spring,

And in their glens, on starry nights,

The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour—

Oh! then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent!

Now round us spreads the watery plain—

Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order’d, that their longing’s fire

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?

Who renders vain their deep desire?—

A God, a God their severance ruled!

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea. 1 [Note: Matthew Arnold, To Marguerite.]

No More Sea

Literature

Burns (D.), Sayings in Symbol, 85.

Bushnell (H.), Moral Uses of Dark Things, 402.

Campbell (R. J.), City Temple Sermons, 234.

Forbes (J. T.), God’s Measure, 75.

Hay (W.), God’s Looking-Glass, 116.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistles of John to Revelation, 355.

Maclaren (A.), Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 325.

Macmillan (H.), Bible Teachings in Nature, 291.

Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 32.

Parkhurst (C. H.), The Blind Man’s Creed, 219.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Evening by Evening, 356.

Spurgeon (T.), Down to the Sea, 45.

Stuart (A. M.), The Path of the Redeemed, 178.

Christian World Pulpit, lii. 374 (J. H. Burkitt); lxviii. 195 (H. S. Seekings).

Verse 5

God’s New World

And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.— Revelation 21:5.

In this chapter of Revelation, we are at length in still waters. We have read of trials and judgments; we have read of foes and battles; we have read of sorrows of the righteous and triumphs of the ungodly. Shall there be no end of these things? no end of this state of imperfection, of warfare, of unrest? no end of these vicissitudes and alternations, of these inversions of right and wrong, of these perpetual renewals of a strife once decided? Yes, out of the ruin of the old world there rise a fresh heaven and a fresh earth. The Holy City is now seen descending from the hands of its Builder and Maker, prepared “as a bride adorned for her husband.” The voice of one of the angels is then heard, proclaiming, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with man, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them”—the full realization of the prophetic name, Immanuel, God with us, bestowed upon our Lord ( Matthew 1:23)—their God. “And he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more; the first things [that belonged to the old order, the fashion of this world] are passed away.”

Then for the first time St. John hears God the Father speak: “Behold, I make all things new” (fresh). It is the voice of the Throned One, the One who rules over all things from the beginning, and who has presided over all the changing scenes of earth’s history; it is He who makes even the wrath of man to praise Him, and who causes all things to work together for good to them that love Him, who gives this heart-helping assurance. “I am making all things new.” In spite of all the moral disorder, the pain and grief, the dark shadows of life and history, the new creation is being prepared, and will rise, like the early creation, out of chaos.

i. The Speaker

1. The Speaker is God the Father. Throughout the whole Book of Revelation, says Swete, “he that sitteth on the throne” is the Almighty Father, as distinguished from the Incarnate Son. And so it is probable that here for the first time in the book we listen to the words of God Himself, for it is the first time that “he that sitteth on the throne” is represented as speaking. His words go to the centre of things and reach to their circumference, and they are gracious in their purpose: “Behold, I make all things new.”

2. Is there a difficulty in the representation of the Father as Judge supreme? The doctrine seems to join issue with John 5:22, “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son”; and indeed with the whole current of early Christian tradition. Swete finds a possible reconciliation of the two views in the oneness of the Father and the Son ( John 10:30)—when the Son acts, the Father acts with and through Him ( John 5:19). St. Paul speaks of the judgment-seat of Christ ( 2 Corinthians 5:10), and also of the judgment-seat of God ( Romans 14:10).

It would seem as if the threefold Personality had become united in one name. No more we hear of “Let us make”; we are now confronted by an intenser term, “Behold, I make all things new.” It would seem as if each Person in the Divine Trinity had times of special expression and times of special relation to nature and to man and to providence and to destiny; now it is the Father, and the other Persons of the Trinity are concealed, as it were, behind His glory: now it is the Son, the only-begotten Son, the Saviour of the world; and, finally, it is the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, who rules the whole mystery of human development. And what if now the Three should in a peculiar and definite sense be One—as if the Three-One should all be speaking in, “Behold, I make all things new”? 1 [Note: Joseph Parker.]

ii. The Place of the Promise

There are three texts which should be taken together:

“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” ( Genesis 1:31).

“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together (R. V. marg. “with us”) until now” ( Romans 8:22).

“And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new” ( Revelation 21:5).

God’s world is the subject of these three verses. The first describes God’s world as it was; the second, God’s world as it is; the third, God’s world as it shall be.

1. God’s world as it was when He made it.—The report of it is—and it is God’s own report—that it was very good. It could not be improved. It was perfect. God’s eye saw no flaw in it, God was satisfied and delighted with it. It was all glory and beauty, music and song, happiness and peace. The Greek word for “world” contains the idea of order. Nothing was out of place in God’s world. But the word “very good” has more than a material and more than an artistic meaning. It is a moral word. It means that there was a contrast between the world as God made it and the world as it afterwards became. It means that there was no sin in God’s world as He made it.

2. God’s world as it is.—It is no longer very good. Ichabod is written across the face of it. Its glory has departed. Not that the primal order has become pure chaos. God “in His heaven” has been working in the world from the beginning until now. Wherever His hand is not interfered with by the will of man there is order still. Nature is even continually restoring the beauty that man has defaced. It is the moral world and all that depends upon it, the sphere in which the will of man works, that has suffered an eclipse. For sin has entered, and with sin death: the first a murder, the last a suicide. “Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people” ( Jeremiah 9:1). “God’s in His heaven”; but it is prophecy, not history, to say “All’s right with the world.”

3. God’s world as it shall be.—The first thing is that God is to come down and dwell in it. His tabernacle is with men, and He will dwell with them. The next thing is that He will recognize, and be recognized by, His people. They shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them and be their God. And the third thing is that death and sorrow and pain shall be no more. And how is it that these three things are brought to pass? They are brought to pass through “the blood of the Lamb.” There has been a sacrifice made for sin and uncleanness, and the sacrifice has taken away sin. When Christ said, “It is finished,” He made an end of sin, and opened the way for God to dwell among men, opened the way for their reconciliation and fellowship, for the removal of all the things that follow in the path of sin.

I have seen a stream sink down into the tiniest volume, and I have seen it trailing through the mud in disgrace; and then, far away on the mountain range, clouds gathered and burst, and it was not many hours before the stream came down with the first wave six feet high, and the banks were full of sweet, clean, rejoicing water before the evening. So did Christ come in to this poor human race, and behold the veins have swollen again, not with unclean blood. We can stand and say to the tempted man, Christ died on the cross to conquer sin, and He sits on God’s right hand to administer the effects of His victory. And we can tell the chief of sinners through Christ he can be made a new creation. 1 [Note: John Watson.]

Thou sayest: “Behold, I make all things new”: Good Lord, renew us to fresh powers of loving Thee in the joy of Thine unveiled Presence. Yet to each of us be Thou the Same, and be each soul to Thee the same: say Thou, “It is I,” and give each of us grace to answer, It is I. Amen.

New creatures; the Creator still the Same

For ever and for ever: therefore we

Win hope from God’s unsearchable decree

And glorify His still unchanging Name.

We too are still the same: and still our claim,

Our trust, our stay, is Jesus, none but He:

He still the Same regards us, and still we

Mount toward Him in old love’s accustomed flame.

We know Thy wounded Hands: and Thou dost know

Our praying hands, our hands that clasp and cling

To hold Thee fast and not to let Thee go.

All else be new then, Lord, as Thou hast said:

Since it is Thou, we dare not be afraid,

Our King of old and still our Self-same King. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 487.]

iii. Newness not Novelty

It is not a new world; it is the old world made new. It is not creation; it is redemption. God has not destroyed the world, to begin again; He has renewed the inhabitants of the old world in the spirit of their minds.

There are two words in the original which are necessarily translated alike—“new”—in our versions. Of these two adjectives, one signifies new in relation to time (νέος ), the other new in relation to quality (χαινός )—the first temporal novelty, the second newness intellectual or spiritual. The first indicates that which is young, recent in time; the other not only that which succeeds something else in time, but that which in idea springs out of it, and not only succeeds but supersedes it.

So this word, “I make all things new,” is not the announcement of a perfectly new thing; it does not proclaim an act at that moment done; it is not an exercise, as it were, of instantaneous Omnipotence. This is the completing and the perfecting, rather, of the work of the long ages, the seal of a mighty progression, the top-stone of the great temple, the finishing of the work of the Sabbath of God from the periods of the First Creation.

To make things new is not the same as to make new things. To make new things is the work of the hand; to make things new is the work of the heart. Whenever one sits upon the throne of the heart, all things are made new. They are made so without changing a line, without altering a feature. Enthrone in your heart an object of love, and you have renewed the universe. You have given an added note to every bird, a fresh joy to every brook, a fairer tint to every flower. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Times of Retirement, 92.]

We now come to the year which was, to her, the epoch, the turning-point of her career. On the night of March 7th, 1838, came the moment of moments. “I got up, that morning, one creature,” she herself often said; “I went to bed another creature. I had found my power!” And, all through her life, she kept the 7th of March, with a religious solemnity; she would ask to have herself remembered on it with prayers; she treated it as a second birthday. And rightly; for, on that day, she woke to herself; she became artistically alive; she felt the inspiration, and won the sway, which she now knew it was given her, to have and to hold. 2 [Note: H. S. Holland and W. S. Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, i. 55.]

iv. The Evidence of the Newness

1. The first evidence will be the death-blow of evil.—What are the present evils under which the creation groans and travails? Suffering is one. It is Stoicism, not Christianity, that says suffering is no evil. Sickness and weakness are evils; feebleness of hand and step; toil and want; old age, solitary and begrudged and despised; sorrow and crying, not to be comforted because the loved one is not. All these things will depart on that day, because that will be the execution-day of sin.

If the end of Providence were to secure this race in a garden of Eden, lapped round with comfort where no one should ever taste hunger or pain or loss, then let it be freely granted that this world is a conspicuous failure. It is so badly arranged and so loosely governed that it would bring scandal on a human monarch. Things are so much out of joint that we are obliged to seek for another working theory of life than the garden one, and we find it in the New Testament. Jesus and His Apostles teach that the supreme success of life is not to escape pain but to lay hold on righteousness, not to possess but to be holy, not to get things from God but to be like God. They were ever bidding Christians beware of ease, ever rousing them to surrender and sacrifice. They never complained of their own hard lot, but rather considered that it was gain. Winds blowing off the snow breed hardy men, and fierce seas breaking on rocky coasts make skilful seamen; and if the mind of God was to compel this race up the arduous road that leads to perfection, our dark experience is an open secret. 1 [Note: John Watson, The Potter’s Wheel, 134.]

2. The second evidence of the renovation will be the reinstalment of God.—The Seer saw no temple therein. Why? Because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. He saw no sun. Why? Because the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. What is the occasion of sickness? It is because the Healer is absent from the earth. Of Death? Because the Life-giver is not at hand. Of loneliness? Because sin has taken away our Lord. But thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Do we not believe in the mission of the Christ on earth? Do we not believe that the Kingdom of God can come, and His will be done, on earth? It was just this that our Lord taught to be saving faith. His offer of salvation was conditioned; it depended on a corporate repentance from all acquiescence in evil, a joyous corporate expectation of the perfect good. It is this joyous expectation that ought to be embodied in all our creeds. It is this faith that the Kingdom of Love is at hand that we should be reciting at all our formal worship. It is by this faith, and by this faith alone, that we can accept the full salvation of our Lord Jesus Christ which has been so often rejected.

The revelation of the Gospel, if we judge of it by its main drift and most salient characteristics, was certainly to declare God’s intention of bringing about a renovated earth—to proclaim that it was to come, not by coercion, but by the power of love; not by God without man, but by God within man, who is able

“To accomplish all—more than all things,

Far transcending all our prayers, all our imaginings,

To an extent whose measure is that mighty impulse which thrills us through” ( Ephesians 3:20, Way’s translation).

Loving-kindness springs naturally from this realization of God’s love and power; and the strength of man’s corporate impulse of faith and loving-kindness is the measure of God’s power on earth. 1 [Note: The Practice of Christianity, 111.]

v. The Results of the Newness

1. The “far-off” is brought nigh.—He who was a stranger to God becomes a child in his Father’s house, an heir of God, a jointheir with Jesus Christ. When John Wesley was dying, in a brief moment of returning consciousness, he asked, “What was the text that I preached upon last Sunday?” And when one standing beside him repeated, “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich,” he exclaimed, “Yes, that is it. There is no other.”

In the supreme and central fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the great utterance, “Behold, I make all things new,” finds its typical fulfilment. It is the verity and the hope of the Resurrection that strikes the keynote of the New Testament: the idea of renewal, of a new beginning, of a new spiritual impulse. The latest book of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, sums up the experience of humanity before the Saviour’s coming: “The thing that hath been it is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun.” But with the Resurrection on the third day old things passed for ever away. Jesus risen is the one essentially new thing in the world. He is our hope for the future: our well-spring of life and energy and gladness. Fast bound in misery and iron, humanity has “an eye unto him” and is “lightened.” To Him as the risen Saviour and Revealer of God, it can lift the Psalmist’s cry, “All my fresh springs shall be in thee.” So the last book of the New Testament closes with the vision of the holy city, “New Jerusalem,” coming down from God out of heaven. Here then is the keynote of our faith; a new doctrine, a new covenant, a new commandment, new wine in new bottles, a new name, a new creation, a new man, a new song, a new heaven and earth wherein dwelleth righteousness: all things new. 1 [Note: R. L. Ottley, The Rule of Faith and Hope, 71.]

2. Bitterness is turned into blessing.—A wonderful sentence comes to us from the Middle Ages. Out of the turmoil, the vice and the bloodshed of the Florence of that day, we hear the voice of the great poet as he says in his immortal words: “In sua voluntade è nostra pace” (“In the doing of His will lies our peace”). How did Dante know that? Has any thought risen higher than that through all the centuries? In the doing of God’s will, the surrendering of ourselves to His appointment, the accepting of the cup because He sent it, is not only the discipline we need, not only the promise of strength and attainment, but, far more than this, the deep abiding Divine peace of the soul.

I know no more intellectually of the Truth than when I first believed; but what a result comes from its abiding! A deeper, deeper happiness absorbs the heart and pervades the soul. A deepening calm rules and assimilates the faculties, and compels them into action; not excitement, but definite and proper action. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, which baffles analysis, which has an infinitude of depth about it. As you cannot understand remote stars, nor the everchanging vault which you cannot at all explore, but can only feel as you feel your life, so you cannot touch this Peace of God with your understanding. It lies round you like an atmosphere. It dwells in you like a fragrance. It goes from you like a subtle elixir vitæ. “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto you.” May God double to you His peace. 1 [Note: Letters of James Smetham, 81.]

It is a rest that deeper grows

In midst of pain and strife;

A mighty, conscious, willed repose,

The death of deepest life.

To have and hold the precious prize

No need of jealous bars;

But windows open to the skies,

And skill to read the stars!

Who dwelleth in that secret place,

Where tumult enters not,

Is never cold with terror base,

Never with anger hot.

For if an evil host should dare

His very heart invest,

God is his deeper heart, and there

He enters into rest.

When mighty sea-winds madly blow,

And tear the scattered waves,

Peaceful as summer woods, below

Lie darkling ocean caves:

The winds of words may toss my heart,

But what is that to me!

’Tis but a surface storm—thou art

My deep, still, resting sea. 2 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, i. 294.]

3. The unproductive has become fruitful.—The promise is, “Ye shall bear much fruit.” This is to be the measure and the reward of true discipleship. This is Christ’s reward. This is how He is to see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied. There is that in every heart which responds to this thought. We can all understand something of the feeling of the farmer leaning on his gate and looking at the waving fields of grain about him. He has planted and cultivated, and waited for the harvest, and here it is. He has made the waste land fruitful, and his soul is filled with a supreme satisfaction. Look at the light in the face of the young father over his new-born child, or the joy of the mother as for the first time she presses her infant to her heart. Life has produced life. Fruitfulness has come, the blessed gift of God. We all know its significance; even the dullest and weariest long for its privileges.

Sir Wilfrid Lawson the elder (father of the late baronet), on reaching middle life, had a dangerous illness; and when brought (as he thought) to death’s door, and when the unseen realities of the eternal world seemed breaking upon him, he longed for religious instruction, guidance, and consolation. This he did not expect to find among the worldly or sporting parsons of the neighbouring parishes, and so he sent for a humble Presbyterian minister from the neighbouring hamlet of Blennerhasset—a Mr. Walton—who, by his instructions and prayers, by God’s blessing, brought peace of mind to Sir Wilfrid, so that when he rose from his sick-bed it was with a new view of life and a new purpose in living. In a word, he had become a true earnest Christian upon personal inquiry and conviction, and his tastes and inclinations and aims were completely changed, and he determined henceforth to spread those views of truth that had changed and blessed him, by devoting time and thought and means to their diffusion among his neighbours and friends. Having obtained a peace of mind never known before, he was anxious that those around should share the same priceless treasure. The Scriptures were a new revelation to him, and with strong faith in Jesus Christ as a loving, ever-present Saviour, he felt constrained by example and word and walk to lead others to trust in and serve Him. 1 [Note: G. W. E. Russell, Life of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 3.]

vi. The Extent of it

The words of the Seer are suggested by Isaiah 43:18-19: “Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing.” But, says Swete, the scope of the old prophecy is enlarged indefinitely by the words “all things.” All the fruits of the New Covenant are included.

1. Man is included.—The new world begins in the human heart, and it occupies every part of the personality and every aspect of the life. By his words a man is now justified. His thoughts are brought into captivity to the mind of Christ. Moreover, the newness covers the relation between man and man. There will be the fulfilment of both commandments—the first and greater, and also the second which is like unto it.

2. The whole creation is included.—For “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” Change the man, and you change his world. The new self will make all around it as good as new, though no actual change should pass on it; for, to a very wonderful extent, a man creates his own world. We project the hue of our own spirit on things outside. A bright and cheerful temper sees all things on their sunny side. A weary, uneasy mind drapes the very earth in gloom. Lift from a man his load of inward anxiety, and you change the aspect of the universe to that man; for, if “to the pure all things are pure,” it is no less true that to the happy all things are happy.

For to those in Christ all things are not only new, but they are growing continually newer. In the old world, and with the old man, it is just the other way. Things are always getting older, until life gets to be an insufferable burden, a dreary round, a wretched repetition, and we see backs bent with nothing but pure sorrow, and heads white with none other sickness than vexation of spirit, and men brought to the grave because life was too wearisome, and time too intolerable, and existence too aimless and stale, to be supported any longer. But in the new world, and with the new man, the whole is reversed; and the new cry ever waxes more frequent and more loud, “Look, and look again, how the old is passing, how the new is coming, how things are getting new.” Every day more of the old is weeded out, more of the new is coming in. Life is “fresher and freer” and fuller of promise. There are new discoveries of the Father’s love, new revelations of Christ’s grace, new experiences of the Spirit’s comfort. Life becomes interesting, and entertaining, and significant, and splendid, and grand beyond belief. What views of life Christ’s world contains; what heavens of expansion overarch it; what hills of attainment are reared upon it; what distances of outlook are discernible from it! Yourself, Christ, God—what thoughts about them all you could never have conceived before! History, Time, Eternity—what feelings they stir in you, you never could have felt before! Purpose, Progress, Achievement—what mighty motions of the will they produce! 1 [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 130.]

Dr. S. Reynolds Turner, who superintends a Chinese colporteur in Amoy, writes: “He is one of the most earnest Christians I have met in China, and a real red-hot evangelist. In visiting our stations I have seen a good deal of him on his native heath, and one remark he made sticks to me, since it was so strange from a Chinaman. We were standing on a hillside over-looking the sea, which at that part of the coast is dotted over with islands, and I was revelling in the beauty of the scene under a bright sun and clear skies. Suddenly he turned to me, and said, ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I agreed heartily, but added that I thought Chinamen did not, as a rule, pay attention to such things. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I never saw anything about me, or thought anything beautiful or worth looking at, until I became a Christian; but since then the world gets daily more beautiful, and the more I see of it the more I comprehend our dear Father in heaven.’ ” 1 [Note: Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1906.]

I remember, as though it were yesterday, something that happened in my own life at least thirty-seven years ago. I was a boy, and there came to my father’s house a young man who had been brought to Christ in some services my father had been conducting away up among the Welsh hills. This young man one day was out in our garden, and talking to me about all sorts of things. He interested me as a child, and I loved him. Suddenly he stooped down and took a leaf from a nasturtium plant, put it on his hand, and said to me, “Did you ever see anything so beautiful?” And I looked, and saw all the veins, and the exquisite beauty of it all. Then he said, “Do you know, I never saw how beautiful that leaf was until six months ago, when I gave myself to Christ?” I have never forgotten that. How true I know that to be in my own experience! 2 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan, in The British Weekly.]

God’s New World

Literature

Alexander (W.), The Great Question, 284.

Bonar (H.), Light and Truth: The Revelation, 348.

Dewhurst (E. M.), The King and His Servants, 59.

Dykes (J. O.), Sermons, 249.

Ellicott (C. J.), The Destiny of the Creature, 77.

English (E.), Sermons and Homilies, 33.

Farrar (F. W.), Social and Present-Day Questions, 368.

Green (A. V.), Australian Sermons, 29.

Grimley (H. N.), The Temple of Humanity, 243.

Hunsworth (G.), Light in the Gloom, 37.

Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, ii. 75.

Killip (R.), Citizens of the Universe, 230.

Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 92.

Miller (G. A.), The Life Efficient, 65.

Parker (J.), City Temple Pulpit, i. 2.

Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, iii. 151.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, vi. 17.

Sadler (M. F.), Sermon Outlines, 84.

Stimson (H. A.), The New Things of God, 9.

Temple (W.), Studies in the Spirit and Truth of Christianity, 95.

Vaughan (C. J.), The Family Prayer and Sermon Book, i. 121.

Welldon (J. E. C.), The Gospel in a Great City, 18.

Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), Bread in the Wilderness, 48.

Wright (D.), The Power of an Endless Life, 255.

Christian World Pulpit, x. 168 (G. W. M‘Cree); lxvi. 17 (J. Strong); lxvii. 86 (K. Lake); lxxxii. 276 (R. Evans).

Church of England Pulpit, lix. 142 (K. Lake).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1906, p. 33; 1910, p. 5.

Churchman’s Pulpit; The Old and New Year, ii. 439 (J. R. Darbyshire), 509 (C. J. Vaughan); Septuagesima Sunday, iv. 292 (H. A. Stimson); Easter Day and Season, vii. 356 (A. Grannis).

Congregationalist, 1873, p. 7 (J. O. Dykes).

Literary Churchman, xxxiii. (1887) 551 (S. Baring-Gould).

Preacher’s Magazine, viii. 27 (W. Wakinshaw).

Verse 27

The Citizens of the City

And there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.— Revelation 21:27.

1. The New Jerusalem, as seen in the vision of the Book of Revelation, is a city differing in many respects from cities in the modern world. There is no night there, no curse, no temple. It is to be, not, as are many modern cities, for the troubling of the nation, but for its healing. It is to be the source of light and health and glory to all mankind. There is no relapse into heathenism or barbarism, no dark ages yet to come. The new city has an eternal day. The light of God’s Presence never wavers. The translucent buildings and walls transmit all the light of life that is concentrated in her to the nations and peoples without. Her gates are ever open—everything that is of value, every talent, every power, every gift in the sum of human perfections is concentrated here to the Divine service. All the nations offer their glory and honour, not as captives robbed of their freedom, and despoiled of their treasures in a Roman triumph, but as free and loving subjects, as those who hate falsehood and immorality, and order their conduct in obedience to the laws that bind the citizens of the kingdom of the Lamb.

2. This ideal city which St. John depicts is not heaven, except in so far as heaven is already latent in the earth and shall finally be realized in it. The indications of the path of interpretation are clear. The ideal city is the Holy Jerusalem, and stands in contrast to the great city Babylon. Whether we take them separately, or oppose them to one another, their meaning is obvious. It is certainly not heaven and hell that they represent, but rather the forces and dominions upon earth of good and evil. Jerusalem represents here, as it does in ancient prophecy—upon which the pictures of this book are almost entirely based—the people of God upon earth, in their holy character and their organized force. If there were any doubt of this, the added picture of “the bride, the Lamb’s wife,” would remove all uncertainty. For, whether we turn to the Old Testament or to the New, the metaphor is consistently applied to the covenant people of God. The ideal city, therefore, represents the Church of Christ in its ideal meaning and its ideal attainment. It is not a “jeweller’s shop,” as some have called it in supercilious and ignorant scorn. It is a symbolic picture of the spiritual power and grandeur which God has destined for the earth.

3. The text speaks of its citizens. And it tells us that there is nothing but moral disability that excludes from citizenship, as there is nothing but moral power that can entitle to its privileges. It is not the wise and the prudent, the opulent and the mighty, that have a right to the seats of the blessed in the City of Life. No key of gold can open the gates of the New Jerusalem, or secure an entrance therein. For the strong angel at the gate esteems the riches and the honours of men as nothing and less than nothing. But the gates are ever open to the pure in heart, and the angel knows no title to the glory of the city except the title of the pure. Only “they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life” can find that holiness of spirit which shall admit men through the gates of the city of God.

I

Those who may not Enter

“There shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie.”

1. The first description of those who may not enter the city of God involves simply the assertion of moral unsoundness. Herein lies the germ of all the possible developments of sin. In the words, “anything unclean,” the reference is to the blemish that detracts from perfect soundness, to the defiling characteristics that distinguish the unclean from the clean, the common from the holy. This moral unsoundness is the elementary fact in the history and progress of sin, and a universal fact in human experience. Whatever controversies may be raised concerning total and partial depravity in the beginning of human life, the universal sweep of moral unsoundness in our race is patent enough to every unprejudiced observer. “Behold I was shapen in iniquity” may be boldly taken as a generalization, and applied to every member of the human family. Such defilement cannot enter into the gates of the eternal city. The “unclean” are for ever the denizens of darkness, and the gates of the city of light give no pathway for their feet.

(1) The margin of the Revised Version tells us that the word translated “unclean” literally means “common.” “Common,” i.e., shared by other nations, was often used by the Jews in a depreciatory sense. Thus they found fault with the disciples of Jesus for eating food with “common,” i.e., unwashed, hands. Our word “vulgar” has much the same sort of depreciatory meaning, and it would have been such an exact rendering in this passage from the Revelation that one feels at first inclined to regret that our translators did not adopt it. But they were clearly right. To have said that nothing vulgar could enter the heavenly city would have given an opening to serious misconstruction. A strange vision of a heaven restricted to the world of rank and fashion might have presented itself to people who identify vulgarity with the working classes—to the kind of people who think that it is vulgar to be poor, and vulgar not to dress for dinner. Yet there the word stands, “common,” “vulgar” (χοινόν ). In the Authorized Version the rendering is “anything that defileth” (χοινοῦ?ν ). But this is an alteration by later copyists. Originally, there is no doubt, the writer wrote, “There shall in no wise enter anything that is common, anything that is vulgar.” The text, then, may be taken as suggesting that there is sometimes to be found in human nature a certain kind of commonness of character, a certain type of vulgarity, which is insufferable in the sight of God, so insufferable that it cannot be admitted into His presence. Whenever it predominates in any human soul, that soul cannot enter into the heavenly city.

(2) It is the egotistic element in our human nature that we cannot even imagine ourselves as bringing into the presence of God. The vulgar person in any rank, from the nobleman to the labourer, is one whose whole interests centre in himself, who is unconscious of the feelings of others, lacking all the delicate sympathies and sensibilities of the gentler nature. One who pushes and tramples, and not only that, but one who is simply obtuse and callous, has in him the root of vulgarity. And this dulness of perception is met with equally in all ranks. Now this egotism, which we recognize as the root of vulgarity, is precisely what we must lay aside on entering God’s presence. He giveth grace to the humble; to follow Christ it is needful to deny or suppress oneself; it is the meek and the modest that alone can realize God’s presence. All purse-proud, or intellect-proud, or success-proud characters—in fact, all egotisms are alike condemned by our instinct as vulgar, and by our conscience as incapable of entering into the Kingdom of God.

(3) There is often an inherent vulgarity in sin, which we must shut utterly out of our lives, if our heart is to be in communion with Him who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. Vulgarity, it is true, is not exactly the same thing as sin. It is sin seen in a certain light, in a very hateful and ugly light; sin viewed as egotistical, unenlightened, callous, self-complacent. Egotism, callousness, self-complacency—these are just the qualities which we must lay aside if we wish to come before the presence of God. We cannot even begin to lead a religious life unless we are striving to deny self, to love our brother, and to be humble-minded. More terrible, perhaps, than any other kind of vulgarity is the vulgarity of moral uncleanness. What more hopelessly vulgarizes a life than this? What more completely blinds it to the light of the Divine Presence? Only to the pure heart is vouchsafed the blessing of seeing God. Let us turn the searchlight of conscience upon our hearts, and ask ourselves whether we have that inner refinement of character and purity of soul which alone can enable us to live the life of the Spirit, or whether we are among the vulgar, the truly vulgar, who can in no wise enter into the heavenly city.

The essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callousness, which in extremity becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy—of quick understanding—of all that, in deep insistence on the common but most accurate term, may be called the “tact” or “touch-faculty” of body and soul: that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures—firmness and fullness of sensation, beyond reason;—the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true: it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recognise what God has made good. This is the chief vulgarity, that of character, the dull unconscious egotism; but there is also a vulgarity of intellect. There are minds which are so absorbed in personalities and trifles as never to rise to human interests in literature or politics, or the life of the home circle; and that without possessing the unlettered and often courteous dignity of the peasant. Ignorance is not vulgarity; the vulgarity lies in a prostitution of education to trivialities, or worse, which pastures on the criminal, or sporting, or society, or other gossip of the day. We feel the incompatibility of such a mind with all the higher life. This sort of vulgarity also excludes itself from the heavenly city. It is “whatsoever things are true … honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report”; it is these and thoughts of these that fit our minds for that city of the heavens. And the vulgarity of character and of intellect leads on by a dreadful law to the worst of all its manifestations, which is spoken of as uncleanness. The utter egotism, the want of respect and sympathy for others, the absorption in self-gratification, kept in check by no thought of what is pure and lovely and divine in others or ourselves, find here their crowning manifestation, and assuredly this blots out, like some dense fumes, the light of the presence of God, and debases the whole nature.

2. The next stage in the development of evil is that of moral offensiveness. Moral “uncleanness” rapidly becomes moral “abomination.” In spite of the sinfulness of human nature, sin at a certain stage becomes offensive to the moral sense of the bulk of the people. There is an early point in the career of sin where the personal consciousness of moral obliquity far outweighs its moral offensiveness to others. The external relations of sin have not developed to the point of its becoming an abomination to men, though it is already an abomination to the all-holly God. But the road from “uncleanness” to “abomination” is an open way. The sphere is one, and the path is continuous. The beginnings of moral evil must be cleansed, otherwise the godless man that has not yet forfeited the respect of society by offensiveness of life is destined, some day, to walk side by side with the miscreant, the savour of whose evil deeds reeks through the land.

You will observe the seer is speaking not of persons, but of things. One might wonder at first sight why he does not from the outset use the masculine form. Why does he not say, “There shall in no wise enter into it any man that worketh abomination”? In the case of the second clause, the Revised Version has inserted the personal element, “ he that worketh a lie.” Yet I have no hesitation in saying that in so doing it has weakened, and not strengthened, the original sense. The writer is speaking primarily and mainly, not of actors, but of the influence of their acts. Indeed, it is a great blessing for the human race that it should be so. Personal salvation would be impossible except on the supposition that a man shall be enrolled in the membership of the Kingdom while yet he is in a state of uncleanness. This has always been regarded as the pith and marrow of the evangelical doctrine. It is as philosophical as it is orthodox, and it is as comforting as it is philosophical. The man who would enter the Kingdom of Christ must, according to St. Paul, enter by faith alone. He must not wait until he is pure. He must be content to come with the intention of purity, with the desire to be what he is not. He must be allowed to put his foot on the sacred threshold “just as he is, without one plea.” He must be accepted for an aspiration. If he would have his name written in the book of life, it must be written there in advance of his life. He must be justified before he is sanctified—pronounced fit for the Kingdom in the light of days to come. The only hope for him is his permission to survive, his permission to enter within the gates of gold, while yet his own life has not transcended the brass. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Sidelights from Patmos, 327.]

3. The final stage of evil is the complete perversion of the moral judgment as well as of the moral life—“maketh (or worketh) a lie.” In the 22nd chapter we find the fuller phrase—“loveth, and maketh a lie.” Sin, having grown into an abomination, acts upon the inner life of the sinner no less powerfully than it does on the moral sense of the beholders. Its external offensiveness goes hand in hand with internal destructiveness, until the life becomes perverted into fossilized evil and its every activity becomes a living lie. At last evil is loved as good, and good as evil. The true meaning of things becomes entirely distorted, and the soul lives and moves in an environment of absolute falsehood. Herein lies the consummation of the city of darkness, the barren and foul realm of untruth, which stands out in sharply defined contrast to the city that shines with the glory of God, with the blaze of the infinite Truth.

The words “to make (or do) a lie” are like our Lord’s words, “He that doeth truth.” To “make a lie” is to act contrary to the truth of man’s being in his relation to God. Those who thus “make a lie” will always love darkness, and “hate the light” that shines from the City of God. But those who “do the truth” will love the light and come to the light which shines from her.

Why does the seer of Patmos say “maketh a lie” and not “telleth a lie”? It is because he is not thinking of a spoken lie. He is thinking of what we call the principle of make-believe. He is contemplating the efforts of men to make the appearance pass for the reality, to give a gloss to circumstances, to cause things to seem what they are not, and not to seem what they are. And he declares that the result of these attempts is ever the same—evanescence. He maintains that nothing which is unreal can be permanent, that no sham can live, that everything false is, by its very nature, doomed to perish. And here again he has prophesied truly. Is there any sphere where the principle of Divine survival is so clearly manifest as in the region of illusions? Even the destruction of impurity is not so rapid. It is often left for a future generation to behold the dissolution of what was base and defiled. But every man, within his own lifetime, within a corner of his own lifetime, has been privileged to witness the death of make-believe. All this is no accident; it is a law, God’s law, that law of Divine survival by which nothing lives on the stream of history which has won its pre-eminence by “making a lie.” 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Sidelights from Patmos, 331.]

In Plato’s ideal state, while lying on part of the private citizens is condemned, it is allowed to magistrates. As Rendel Harris says, 2 [Note: Sidelights on New Testament Research, 231.] it is a reserved art, practised by the guardians of the community upon the rank and file, presumably for their good. The rulers have reserved rights in untruthfulness. “The lying,” he continues, “which Plato inculcated was not of the pitiful degraded kind which Liguori patronizes and which Cardinal Newman was so hard put to it to defend. But whatever was covered by the Platonic doctrine, the Christian Church generally repudiated it, and it is expressly repudiated in the Apocalyptic sketch of the New City.”

II

Those who may Enter

“Only they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”

1. Their names are written in a book.—To live in a book is one of the deepest desires of men. There are few who have not wished to have an influence on earth extending beyond the range of their earthly life. To have something that will survive us, something that will speak of us when we are gone, something that will make us a power in the world after we have passed away, is an ambition which, in some form or other, has been felt by all. Various have been the forms it has taken. Some have sought it by winning love, some by leaving a mass of money, some by rearing a monument of art, some by bequeathing the creations of music. But even those who would live by art, by sculpture, by music, expect to have their name preserved through the medium of a book. It is in no case by our own book that we mainly hope to live. Our ambition is to have our names written in some other book, to be quoted as an authority, to be referred to as an illustration. Even to write one’s name in a visitors’ book has a kind of symbolic pleasure; it suggests the transmission of fame. Even to appear in the fleeting columns of the newspaper gives a glow of satisfaction; it conveys the impression of publicity. But to have the name written in a real book, a living book, a book that will live, to appear in pages that are destined to last for centuries, to obtain honourable mention in a record that will endure as long as the language of your country—this is a goal of aspiration which any man might be proud to win.

Our ambition is to get our names in a living book, a book that will live. But where is such a book to be found? How many books are there of living writers which one would venture to pronounce immortal? I have often asked myself, if all the authors of the present day were to stop writing from this moment, how many would be remembered, even by name, twenty-five years after this. It would be invidious to say. Meantime, we cannot but observe that there is nothing in which the calculations of men have been so falsified as the fate of books. Works which were confidently promised an immortality by their contemporaries have, in a few years, been buried in oblivion; and works which, by their contemporaries, were unnoticed and unknown have filled the world with their fame. Sydney Dobell was pronounced a great dramatist; Alexander Smith was called one of the greatest of poets; yet Sydney Dobell is altogether, and Alexander Smith almost, forgotten. Thomas à Kempis issued his book in the darkness, and its coming woke no echoes in its time; but the world found it after many days, and posterity gave it a place next to the Bible. Every book that lasts through a series of centuries is in a sense a “Lamb’s book.” It has achieved success by sacrifice. It has postponed a temporal to an eternal interest. It has refused to follow the fashions of the hour. It has declined to purchase popularity by pandering to the spirit of a special age. It selects universal types of men, and is content to wait till that which is special has passed away. If Shakespeare had written for his age, he would have been famous in his age. But he preferred to disregard the accidents of humanity, to ignore that which was peculiar to the sixteenth century; and therefore he has found his atmosphere only in a later day. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Sidelights from Patmos, 321.]

2. It is the book of life.—The book of life is that great volume in which the eternal and inexorable conditions of life are written. It is not, as some have supposed, an arbitrary catalogue of names, selected without a moral basis from the multitudes of men, to which eternal life is attached by an omnipotent fiat. Its fundamental character is not more elective than it is moral and spiritual. It is the awful and eternal focus of power out of which the currents of life perennially flow. It is the great God’s charter of life based upon God’s own nature, upon eternal truth and righteousness. The “book of life” is the record and forecast of victorious moral grandeur, of the vast achievement of God-given power in the hearts of men. It is the roll of heroes, the volume of the mighty, the record of the pure, the list of the strong sons of God.

Those who returned from the Babylonian captivity were enrolled by families in a great book kept for that purpose. The names in this roll were supposed to constitute the new Israel; the nation which was henceforth a religious community—a church and a kingdom in one. To this nation was committed the task of rebuilding the sacred city of Jerusalem, and re-instituting the ancient worship of God on Mount Zion. But, when the exiles got home from Babylon, these people were disgusted by the paganism and poor moral quality of their kinsmen whom they found already there. This was the reason why they were so particular about the book of names. They refused to worship with or include in their fellowship those who had intermixed with foreign nations, and degraded the service of God by heathen rites. They therefore became very strict about the qualifications for citizenship in the new Jerusalem which they had now to build. Only those whose names were on the roll as being qualified by character, training, and descent for membership in the new kingdom were admitted to the altar, or allowed to dwell within the walls. But this ideal of a City of God and a Book of Life was never forgotten. Henceforth Babylon became a synonym for the Roman Empire, and the Book of Life a metaphor to signify those who were included in the Church of Jesus.… It is no longer the roll of those who came back from Babylon and were found worthy of citizenship in the reconstituted kingdom of Judah; it is the number of those who belong to Jesus in earth and heaven. 1 [Note: R. J. Campbell, Thursday Mornings at the City Temple, 284.]

3. It is the Lamb’s book of life.—The phrase further teaches that the focus of life for fallen humanity is the Lamb. There is only one book of life for men, and that is the “Lamb’s book.” Men, having lost the central fount of power through the Fall, must rediscover it in the sacrificial Lamb of the cross. In the Lamb is now stored all God’s power for the salvation of men. Strange that men are so slow to believe and accept this momentous truth. To-day, as in the days of His flesh, the Son of Man must often say, “Ye will not come to me, that ye may have life.”

It is the Leper Asylum at Bankura—where the stage between the painful pilgrimage and the painless City is passed.… In the little church a pathetic sight is seen—squatting on the cool concrete floor, groups of men on one side, and women on the other side, are ranged. In front of the entrance the untainted children of the lepers from the Children’s House are seated. The dread disease may at any time appear.… A hymn is given out. How they sang! A strange weird tune, sweet music to the angels bending down to hear the lepers’ song of praise. Some lips were swollen and features disfigured. Others hid, under the one white garment, hands and feet from which fingers and toes were rapidly disappearing, or had already vanished. After the hymn every head was bent in prayer, an address was delivered, and then, after another hymn, came the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The missionary took the bread from one to another and slowly and with difficulty in many cases it was eaten, until he came to one bright-faced woman whose hands were mere shapeless pads; she tried to raise the bread but dropped it, and after a fruitless effort to recover it held out the end of her sari and lifted that to her lips. The cup was of course impossible. The minister with a spoon poured the wine into each upturned mouth; then all joined in repeating the beautiful words of the service.

“They which are written in the Lamb’s book of life” enter in, leaving the uncleanness this side of that beautiful painless City. 1 [Note: The Foreign Field, April 1908.]

An illustration may be given of the use which Stanley made of the opportunities of talking with working men, when showing them over Westminster Abbey. In 1882, at Bletchley Station, a gentleman travelling from Norwich to Liverpool entered a third-class smoking-compartment, which had as its other occupants two soldiers.

“ We were,” he said, “a very quiet party; one of the soldiers was reading a tract, the other was smoking. I was trying to decipher the title of the tract, or, if possible, to get into conversation with the reader of it, who sat opposite to me. At Rugby my opportunity came, when I proffered a light, at the same time asking what was the tract that seemed to interest them so much, for the second man was now reading it. I learnt that the tract was ‘Wycliffe and the Bible’. They had each read it twice, and begged me to accept it, as it was ‘so good everybody should read it.’ ‘Where is your home?’ I asked. ‘Chester, sir.’ I said, ‘I, too, am from a cathedral city—the city of Norwich.’ ‘Norwich!’ both of them exclaimed, ‘why, that’s where Dean Stanley lived!’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what do you know about Dean Stanley?’ I shall never forget the expression of the face turned towards me, as the speaker said, ‘Me and my mate here have cause to bless the Lord that we ever saw good Dean Stanley, sir, I can tell you.’ Then they recounted to me how some years before, when they had been at Shoeburyness for gunnery practice, they were released from duty a day earlier than they expected, and instead of starting for home they decided to spend the day in London. In carrying out this decision they found themselves at the Abbey just as the doors were locked, and they turned to retrace their steps with deep disappointment, which found expression. ‘Our words and disappointed looks,’ continued my friend, ‘attracted the notice of a gentleman, who approached us and said, “You very much wish to see the inside of the Abbey, do you? Well, can’t you come to-morrow?” “No, sir, we must be at Chester to-morrow, and if we don’t see inside the Abbey to-day, it’s not likely we ever shall.” With this the gentleman invited us to go with him, and, taking the keys from the beadle, he entered with us into the Abbey, walking by our side, and pointing out to us the things most worth seeing. Presently he came to a marble monument erected to one of our soldiers, and, as we stood looking at it in admiration, the gentleman said, “You wear the uniform of Her Majesty, and I daresay would like to do some heroic deed worthy of a monument like this.” We both said, yes, we should—when, laying his hand on each of us, he said: “My friends, you may both have a more enduring monument than this, for this will moulder into dust, and be forgotten; but you, if your names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, you will abide for ever.” We neither of us understood what he meant—but we looked into his grave, earnest, loving face with queer feelings in our hearts, and moved on. Just as we were leaving the Abbey, our guide told us he was the Dean, and invited us to the Deanery to breakfast next morning. We did not forget to go, and after breakfast the Dean came to say good-bye. He gave us money enough to pay our fares to Chester, and once again, in earnest, loving tones, he told us to be sure and get our names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and then, if we never met again on earth, we should meet in Heaven. And so we parted with the Dean; and as we travelled home we talked about our visit to the Abbey, and puzzled much as to the meaning of the Lamb’s Book of Life.’ ”

It will be enough to say that those words proved the turning-point in the lives of those two men and their wives, and that as one of them said, “We trust that our names are written in the Book of Life, and that we may some day, in God’s good time, meet Dean Stanley in heaven.” 1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, ii. 312.]

The Citizens of the City

Literature

Aitchison (J.), The Children’s Own, 214.

Campbell (R. J.), Thursday Mornings at the City Temple, 284.

Johnston (J. B.), A Commentary on the Revelation, 258.

Lushington (F. de W.), Sermons to Young Boys, 15.

Matheson (G.), Sidelights from Patmos, 319.

Milligan (G.), Lamps and Pitchers, 183.

Oosterzee (J. J. van), The Year of Salvation, ii. 315.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 30.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, xi. 161.

Scott (C. A.), Revelation (Century Bible), 151.

Scott (J. J.), The Apocalypse, 140.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxvii. (1881), No. 1590.

Swete (H. B.), The Apocalypse of St. John, 52, 297.

Thomas (J.), The Ideal City, 199.

Vaughan (C. J.), Lectures on The Revelation, 505.

Waddell (R.), Behold the Lamb of God! 287.

Wilson (J. M.), Sermons Preached in Clifton College Chapel, ii. 28.

Woods (H. G.), At the Temple Church, 148.

Christian World Pulpit, xxiv. 257 (J. Aldis).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1911, p. 233.

Expository Times, xxi. 347.

Good Words, 1861, p. 126 (A. P. Stanley).